An interesting article:
Rare animals give DNA to 'frozen ark'
Agençe France-Presse
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
A 'frozen ark' of preserved DNA from endangered animals is being set up by U.K. scientists who plan to use cloning to bring back species that may one day become extinct.
Named after the biblical story of Noah, who herded animals onto his ark to save them from a calamitous flood, the project aims to collect DNA and tissue samples from thousands of threatened species.
Project leaders dismissed the idea of bringing back long-extinct species like the dinosaurs, as in the Jurassic Park series of films, but said carefully preserved DNA might be useable in the future.
"I think it will be used for cloning eventually," said Professor Alan Cooper, director of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford and a member of the frozen ark steering committee.
"We're cautious about cloning because it gets so sexed up, but who knows what we're going to be using these specimens for in the future?" he said.
"I believe you can make a case for bringing animals like, say, the tiger back. There would be a pretty strong argument for doing that versus letting them go extinct."
Thousands of species are expected to vanish from the earth within the next three decades, and the project is intended to safeguard their genetic identity well into the future.
A bank of frozen DNA
The first samples have already been collected, and were due to be placed into deep freeze at London's National History Museum.
Duplicate specimens will be kept at other institutions around the world as insurance against damage or loss.
Among the first sets of DNA being preserved are that of the scimitar horned oryx, a critically endangered desert antelope from Saharan Africa, the Socorro dove, a bird native to one island off Mexico but extinct in the wild for 30 years, the yellow seahorse and Polynesian sea snails.
Scientists running the ark project, which is based at the University of Nottingham, hope the project will eventually become a global one.
DNA from the yellow seahorse will join the frozen ark (Image: Natural History Museum)
The scientists will use the IUCN World Conservation Union's Red List of Threatened Species, which details species most at risk of becoming endangered or extinct, to identify animals from which to take DNA.
Although cloning purely from DNA is still some way from being scientifically possible, more basic techniques are already available.
Dr Anne McClaren, who heads the frozen ark committee, said Australia's great northern hairy-nosed wombat, of which around 70 remain in the wild, was an animal which might be helped sooner rather than later.
"They're looking at the reproductive biology of the common wombat and wondering if they could perhaps do a little bit of cloning with tissue from the great hairy-nosed northern wombat," she said.
The original Noah would have been "very proud" of the project bearing his name, she said.
"It's always seemed to me extraordinarily sad and wrong that a species should go extinct without even leaving behind its DNA which could be sequenced," she said.
"For those species with few living relatives it's even more sad."
But Professor Cooper warned against cloning long-extinct species for which no suitable habitat existed, such as the flightless bird the dodo.
"It would be impossible to clone the dodo anyway, but even if you could, what would you do with it? There's no environment left for the dodo," he said.
The University of Nottingham's Professor Bryan Clarke stressed that the project was not a conservation measure.
"[It was] rather a back-up plan for when all best conservations efforts have failed."
